…Eh. I wouldn’t say the episode is outright bad,
because it has some fun stuff in it, but it definitely feels lazy and
overbaked, with an overly sitcommy plot and aggressively-hammered-home points
to make.
Goldie’s
fatigue from her pregnancy results her getting lax in monitoring Shania’s
screentime, and her daughter is soon on her tablet 24/7. Since the guys are pretty much the same,
Goldie tries to find a way for them all to spend some time connecting
face-to-face, and Tech-Free Saturdays are proposed. Shania is not
down with this idea and goes intentionally overboard to make a point. Not wanting to be undone, Jane goes on
Twitter for the first time (with Rocky’s help) and creates an inadvertent
cyberspace maelstrom.
Okay, so
they try and throw in a couple justifications, with Shania having more
screentime than usual and Bryan trying to field a PR crisis at work via social
media, but seeing the guys go from almost exclusively using their phones as
actual telephones to thumbing on them constantly is just lazy. It’s the sort of TV convention I hate,
creating something that a character “always does” out of thin air for the
purpose of a solitary episode. Honestly,
it’s not like it wouldn’t be in
character for Bryan to be a social media junkie – he craves attention and lives
for celebrity gossip, c’mon – so why not throw in little bits of business in
earlier episodes showing him getting lost in his phone, just for a second? Don’t tell us something’s a habit if you
haven’t done the work to establish it.
That’s
actually my biggest grievance with the episode, but it annoys me enough to
negatively color most of the proceedings.
But I do like different bits here.
It makes total sense that Jane would be a hit with Twitter trolls, and
the mini-scandal the show creates for her to tweet is a fun one. Also, we get a glimpse of the set of Sing!, the show Bryan runs that’s such a
blatant Glee knock-off it’s
hilarious. Lots of great bits there,
from an able-bodied actor in a wheelchair to “Clea,” Bryan’s very earnest,
brunette lead actress. And, as so often
happens on this show, even a mediocre-to-bad episode can bring it around in the
end with a sweet scene between Bryan and David.
Bryan is
the most over-the-top in the tech addiction in this episode, so he gets most of
the splashback from my annoyance with it, but Andrew Rannells still manages to
wring some good stuff from this hamfisted plot.
He’s a stitch throughout the Sing!
scene, he offers up a terrific bit of unexpected weirdness and hokey fun, and I
love him proclaiming that he can’t function until he knows who Rihanna’s mad at
and/or forgiving at any given moment.
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